apache/iceberg · warning

The iceberg transaction has been committed, but we failed…

Error message

The iceberg transaction has been committed, but we failed to clean the temporary flink manifests: {}

What it means

FlinkManifestUtil logs this warning when an Iceberg snapshot has already been committed successfully but deletion of the temporary Flink-written manifest files (or manifest lists) failed. The commit itself is durable, so this is a cleanup/housekeeping problem, not a data-loss problem; orphan files remain in the table location until expired by snapshot expiration.

Solutions

1. Verify the table data is correct — the commit succeeded, no action is needed for correctness.
2. Check FileIO/storage credentials and permissions allow deletion in the table metadata directory.
3. Run expireSnapshots / removeOrphanFiles to garbage-collect the leftover manifests.
4. Retry the job; if the warning persists, inspect the wrapped exception (logged as 'e') for the storage-side cause.

// ensure FileIO can delete in the table location before committing
io.deleteFile(testManifestPath); // or check permissions via a dry-run delete of a temp file

try { FlinkManifestUtil.deleteCommittedManifests(...); } catch (Exception e) { LOG.warn("manifest cleanup deferred; run expireSnapshots", e); }

When it happens

Trigger: deleteCommittedManifests is invoked after a checkpoint/jobgraph commit and the underlying FileIO.delete of a manifest or manifest-list path throws (e.g. transient S3/HDFS outage, permission denied on the table location, concurrent snapshot expiration already removed the file).

Common situations: Object-store eventual-consistency or throttling (S3 503) during delete; IAM/storage permissions lacking delete on the metadata dir; job crash between commit and cleanup; files already deleted by expireSnapshots running concurrently.

Understand the failure class

Background: "failed to write file", "Could not save figure", "Error saving remote file" — file write failed: causes and fixes across languages and libraries — this error's family across 38 libraries.

Related errors

• An error occurred while aborting the stream
• Bulk deletion failed
• Fail to deserialize aggregated statistics
• Failed on snapshot while reading manifest list
• Failed to close equality delta writer

AI-assisted analysis of apache/iceberg@86d9c8fc54 (2026-09-12). Data as JSON: /api/errors/9ac19f105f1e16a1. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at flink/v2.2/flink/src/main/java/org/apache/iceberg/flink/sink/FlinkManifestUtil.java:181

  static void deleteCommittedManifests(
      String tableName,
      FileIO io,
      List<ManifestFile> manifestsPath,
      String newFlinkJobId,
      long checkpointId) {
    for (ManifestFile manifest : manifestsPath) {
      try {
        io.deleteFile(manifest.path());
      } catch (Exception e) {
        // The flink manifests cleaning failure shouldn't abort the completed checkpoint.
        String details =
            MoreObjects.toStringHelper(FlinkManifestUtil.class)
                .add("tableName", tableName)
                .add("flinkJobId", newFlinkJobId)
                .add("checkpointId", checkpointId)
                .add("manifestPath", manifest)
                .toString();
        LOG.warn(
            "The iceberg transaction has been committed, but we failed to clean the temporary flink manifests: {}",
            details,
            e);
      }
    }
  }
}

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